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Flashback: Miller fired up on House floor

PHOTOS: Who's leaving Congress?

Miller’s decision is a personal loss for Pelosi and is sure to be seen as a blow to Democrats. But Miller said his retirement has everything to do with having reached the 40-year mark in Congress and is no reflection on his party’s chances of regaining power in the House in November.

“I’ve immense confidence in her,” he said of Pelosi. “I am energized by our freshman class, their diversity, their enthusiasm. This decision is about me having been here 40 years. I am comfortable that it is the right time.”

In a short interview, Miller downplayed the significance of his leaving. ““I was never in awe of the `indispensable man’ theory,” he joked. “I tried that once on my high school football coach. And I sat on the bench for most of the year.”

Nonetheless his retirement leaves a big hole to fill.

Just 29 when first elected in 1974, he was already a six-term veteran when Pelosi arrived in the House in the summer of 1987. And like some big, rough-edged younger brother, Miller would be at her side every step of her way up the House leadership.

Indeed at 68, Miller may be the closest thing the House has to its own version of a Teddy Kennedy — stripped of the Camelot drama but with the same fire and imposing presence on the floor of the chamber.

Like Kennedy, the late Massachusetts senator, Miller came to Washington as a young man and heir to his own established political family in California’s Contra Costa County. Like Kennedy again, he was a force in party politics but ultimately legislation became his wheelhouse — most especially bills impacting education, labor rights, and Western land and water issues.

“If you want to get into a fight with me, you better bring your lunch,” Miller would famously tell opponents at committee hearings. Former Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.) once said wryly of his colleague: “He is very honest intellectually, which is redeeming, because he can be brusque.”

One of the last of the Democratic “Watergate babies,” Miller was part of a post-Vietnam 70’s generation filled with moral certitude. And as a young congressman, he had a fiery teacher, the legendary Rep. Phil Burton (D-Calif.) from neighboring San Francisco.

Still in his freshman term, Miller watched Burton lose to Jim Wright — the future House speaker from Texas — in a remarkably close and bitter Democratic battle over the majority leader’s post. Backing Wright then was the late Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), also elected in 1974 and a Marine veteran of the same Vietnam War that Miller had protested.

Years later, after the Republican takeover in 1994, time and Pelosi brought Miller and Murtha closer. In the ensuing debate over the Iraq war and the run-up to Pelosi’s triumph in the 2006 elections, they stood out like bookends or boulders — each at least six-foot-three, 200-plus pounds towering behind the stylish first-woman speaker.